


Later

by gloriousthorn



Category: Andrew Hozier-Byrne (Musician)
Genre: F/M, I'm just putting this in the Hozier fandom because you're all here already, Original Fiction, Writing on Skin, Writing on the Body, holy crap those are actual tags, this is basically original, thought this was just my kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 11:25:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19208410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloriousthorn/pseuds/gloriousthorn
Summary: I would think of this later, when I tried to remember that day: that he had form and weight, that he was subject to gravity.  Because later he would seem as insubstantial as the spray from the edge of the waves, cool and salty against my skin and my lips but only for a moment.





	Later

The day it all changed, I went walking at the bottom of the cliffs in the fading light of a late afternoon. I’d had a little too much whiskey in the cafe overlooking the promenade; the wind that had started as a breeze was too cold, it was deep in October, and my sweater wasn’t warm enough. I pulled my hands into my sleeves and pushed my tote bag, heavy with my journal and too many books, higher on my shoulder; I kicked a few of the seaworn stones with the toe of my boot. It had been the kind of day when the kindly glance of the waitress, over her shoulder as she brought the third glass and I continued writing furiously, nearly drove me to weeping; the low voices of the older couple against the window, the ones I thought I was supposed to know but couldn’t place, filled me with shame over every phone call I hadn’t made to my grandparents while they were still alive. I couldn’t stand my chilled skin, molded around a body that felt too much and not enough all at once, around a head too full of thought to handle any more in the present moment than selecting another clutch of pebbles to kick and scatter. I held on to the tears in my eyes even as the wind sought to pull them out, as the tide turned high and roared at my right shoulder.

A tall, pale figure wrapped in a dark coat leaned against the rocks just ahead of me. I nearly stopped short, wondering if I should turn back, but that was all it took for the figure to take notice of me and incline his face, then his body, towards me, and I froze in fear. He pushed himself away from the rocks with long, slender hands and walked to me.

“Please,” I said as he approached, “I’m fine.”

He stopped a few feet beyond me— a respectful distance, perhaps, like he knew I needed that space between us, but his eyes met mine, gentle and defiant, for a moment before I could look away. I couldn’t hold his gaze, not even in the easy way you can with a stranger you’ll see for a moment and then never again. Because he wasn’t a stranger.

To be sure, I didn’t know him. I would have remembered. No one looked like him. And I would look for him in the months and years after that day, as far as the other side of the ocean. I didn’t know him then. But it hardly mattered. My heart stilled, then raced: _He knows me._

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“I just need to be alone.”

He rocked back on his heels, just an inch or so, his boots making a crunch against the stones on the beach like my own had. I would think of this later, when I tried to remember that day: that he had form and weight, that he was subject to gravity. Because later he would seem as insubstantial as the spray from the edge of the waves, cool and salty against my skin and my lips but only for a moment.

“Ah,” he said. “Is that so.”

“I can’t bear it right now,” I said, “the attention of others. Every pair of eyes is painful.”

“Even mine?”

I forced myself to look at him then, and took a long breath, all the way in through my nose, the kind that’s supposed to steady a racing heart and trembling hands. I would tell myself that later, when I tried to remember what being in his presence was like: it was yoga breathing, that’s all, I could do it again right now. And when I came to the bottom of that breath, the cold air temporarily warmed as I pushed it back out, my heart had indeed slowed and begun to cleave itself, a spring of heat running through the valley between its chambers. His eyes were the color of how I saw the valley— moss in a blue twilight— and in a state of restful, rested waking, like they could wait for me until evening fell, or longer.

“No,” I heard myself say.

He nodded. “That’s right.” He held out a hand to me. “Come over here. You look tired. Like you’ve been carrying your own weight for too long.”

“I am,” I whispered. “So tired.”

“I know.”

I laid my hand in his. It was the first time I’d let a man touch me in a year. And I had no idea who he was.

He led me back toward the rock where he’d been when I first saw him. He took off the dark coat he’d been wearing and wrapped it around me, buttoning the top button and then holding it. I resisted none of it. I would tell myself later that I’d let my guard down out of exhaustion, that the alcohol had lowered all my usual thresholds. I let him cover me for that moment, and it began.

He said, “Tell me what’s got you so tired.”

I looked over my shoulder, where the water roared higher. He’d taken me back far enough where it couldn’t reach us, even as the tide came in, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was coming for me.

I said, “I haven’t— had a home, really, for almost a year now. Staying with friends, sleeping on couches, sometimes on floors. I work, I eat, I sleep, and in between, I—”

He waited.

I took a deep breath. “There was a man,” I said. “I thought I loved him. I stayed with him for so long, hoping— that things would get better.”

He nodded, took my face in his hands, kissed my forehead. The wind kicked up then, and it slipped in the space between his hand and my cheek, rippled across my throat like it knew where the story was.

And like I knew where the story was going next, I began to trust his body, such as it was, against mine. Because in the days that followed, I couldn’t be certain he really walked in the world like me, or anyone else. I laid my head beneath his shoulder; he reached up to stroke my hair. I would remember that, the feeling of his fingers at the top of my neck. It felt real. Even now, it seems like it must have been real.

“I wrote,” I said, “wrote about the good times and the— the terrible ones. About dreams I had, about other men I’d known. Trying to remember, to hold on to— what was worth holding on to. All the while thinking, just a little longer, just— I don’t know. But he found my notebooks, and he read them, and—”

The wind kicked up again, and this time pulled the tears from my eyes, remembering the night I’d left without much more than the clothes I was wearing and the notebooks I’d managed to wrest away.

“He called me a whore,” I whispered. “He said I should be ashamed.”

He sighed and pulled me closer to him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But he spoke that from his own lack, his own cowardice and fear. You’ve kept going. You’re already stronger than he is.”

“I don’t feel that way.” I looked up at him then— his eyes still steady and kind, waiting— and let my body sink further into the soft ground below the stones, let him shelter me. “I feel lost. I want to share what I’ve been working on with people, but I’m so lost. I’m afraid that even the people who say they still love me will leave me when they— when they see who I really am.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know. I just— I thought I was in love, and then I was just— on my own. I’ve come back from it, in some ways. I’m close to a life I want to live— I can almost afford my own place, I finished the book I thought I couldn’t write— but I still feel like I felt today, when every face looking at me knows something I wish they didn’t know. And I feel so far from that life even though I should feel close.”

He shook his head. “You are close,” he said. He touched my face again; it looked like he was thinking, or maybe remembering. Then he said, “I can help you.”

“How?”

“Why don’t you put your bag down,” he said.

I took it off my shoulder and put it down on the ground.

He smiled, just a little, and pulled me to him, and kissed me then, just for a moment. Then he said, “Do you feel a little lighter yet?”

“A little.”

“Do you want to see how light you could feel?”

I didn’t know what he was asking, not really. And so I don’t know why I agreed. But I did.

“Yes,” I whispered.

He laid his hand on my chest for a moment, and I wouldn’t be able to believe it later— I’d tell myself I had to have remembered it wrong, it was cold, the wind, the sun falling in the sky— but his hand, exposed as it was, was warm even through my sweater. Then he unbuttoned the coat and pushed it away from me, but didn’t take it back— he just let it fall to the ground.

“You’re going to be all right,” he said. “I need you to believe that.”

I nodded. “I will.” He lifted off my sweater then, pulling it over my head and tangling my hair even more, and it joined his coat on the ground.

“What—”

He reached behind me and unhooked my bra, and it fell on top of my sweater.

“I—”

“Hold still.”

“People will see.”

“They might,” he agreed. He picked up his coat and draped it over my shoulders. “Do you have something you’ve written, here with you?”

“Yes, but—”

“Can you choose something for me? Something you’re proud of, maybe a little scared of?”

I would wonder, for so long afterwards, why I did it, standing there with the ocean at my back and the wind at my chest, open to the world. Why I took his words at face value, why I shared with him the words that had cost me so much. Surely he could have led me further down the path of ruin. I should have known. I think I did know. But I did it anyway.

I flipped through the pages and chose. “Here,” I said.

He nodded and reached into his pocket, drawing out a thick pen. “Read it to me,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“You can.” He took my hand. “It’s just you and I here, with the waves and the wind. I want to hear you. I want you to feel your words landing safely.”

I looked down at the page, my vision blurred:

_Later, I drew figure eights on your forearm—_

—and as I read he went down on one knee before me and began to write the words across my collarbones and to my left shoulder, right up to where the coat met my body, and when he reached the end of my shoulder I drew my breath in sharply.

“Keep going.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

He looked up at me, the moss-green in the blue twilight, and later I would look for that color for the rest of my life— “Just keep going.”

It was cold, and there was nothing between my heart and the world except my skin, pale and raised, and my notebook trembled in my hands. I read on:

 _later let you have me like you’d_  
_wanted, and wanted, a bold smile,_  
_a cocksure plea—_ fuck me, beautiful—

I slowed my pace to meet his, but not too much— he wrote briskly, like he’d always known the words and the contours of my body.

 _later ran my thumbnail across your chest:_  
you’re crazy but I like you anyway,  
_let you believe it was hieroglyphics, or a spell—_

 _later watched you worry in your sleep,_  
_brows two deep apostrophes above a broad nose—_

His hold on the pen was steady. It scraped ever so gently over the gooseflesh of my chest, my breasts, the bottom of my ribcage and the bow of the top of my hips. “How many more lines have you got there?”

“Three.”

He nodded, blew on the last line for a moment to dry it, and unbuttoned my jeans.

“It’s not that important, the last stanza.”

“It’s all important.” He unbuttoned my jeans and pushed them down, taking my panties with them, just a few inches. “Keep going.”

I could hardly stand still for the chill, all the heat I had in my face and, increasingly, just beneath his hand, still warm against me (how, I would wonder later, much later, when it occurred to me to find it strange). But I finished reading, and he wrote the last lines across the very top of my thighs—

 _later still saw the light bounce off the spoon_  
that rattled in the jar from which you’d drunk the water,  
_marveling at the only trace you left._

—and the words I’d written were marked on my body in his handwriting— feathery and light for a man’s, lots of tall lowercase letters, a small loop here and there . (Later I would wonder, too, what I thought of my body in that moment. The thoughts of the mirror, of the dark moments— _too much here, not enough there—_ didn’t occur to me. My words covered them.)

I looked up. He had laid his hand on his heart, still holding the pen.

“How much lighter do you feel?” he asked.

I wondered, somewhere far back in my mind, if I could be seen. If other people were there, gazing out at us from the promenade or from the road that ran behind the rock formations. But all I could see was him, those eyes of moss in a blue twilight. I heard his voice— soft, like it just glided along with the waves instead of fighting to be heard over them. I couldn’t answer because I’d gone along with him, and I was lighter, as light as his voice, as the crest of a wave.

“Let go,” he said.

I’d been holding his coat at the edges of the lapels, right at the base of my neck.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

And I did. I let it drop to the ground, again, and my words and my body stood with nothing between them and the world. The sun set over his left shoulder as he rose from the ground, and stepped back, and considered me and the water and the darkening sky in the east.

“Now,” he said, “do you feel it? The lightness of it?”

I thought about it. The wind gusted and then immediately slowed, as though it had taken whatever may have remained of the fear, the shame. Later I would tell myself that the warmth I felt was just that, the wind dying down and settling into the sunset. That was all.

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s just you and your words now. You don’t have to carry anything else with you.”

“And that will be enough?”

“Remember this,” he said. “Remember not needing anything else in this moment. Remembering being afraid, until you weren’t anymore.”

And later I would remember, even when I couldn’t believe it had really happened. Sometimes I still can’t. I sit in an armchair in a house just down the road from the beach, where I came to live a few years afterwards; I find myself surrounded by the friends who still loved me after I published the book. And I remember the man who held my face in his hands one last time and kissed me goodbye, and said, “You can keep the coat. It’ll get chilly.”

And he smiled and loped away, behind the rock, and he must have gone down the road, where I never knew. I watched until I couldn’t see him anymore, and slowly I tugged up my jeans and put on the rest of my clothes and shrugged back into his coat. It smelled ever so lightly of the sea, and of moss in a blue twilight, the kind that was falling over the rocks and the water, as if this was the only place he had ever been.

I never saw him again.

But I was never so tired again.

**Author's Note:**

> The poem embedded in the story is also mine.


End file.
